What do you associate with the term still life? Is it highly detailed, and realistic painted images of flower bouquets and tables laden with lavish bowls of fruit and game from a time past? Yes, the still life genre uses inanimate objects such as flowers, fruit and vegetables, and manufactured items to symbolically reflect on…
There’s all sorts of ways to approach and engage with the contemporary art of our times. It can be helpful to start with an artwork’s physical form, its size, the materials from which it’s made, or even how the various elements relate to each other. Brisbane-born painter Robert MacPherson (1937–2021) was one of Australia’s most…
Continue reading » “Understanding the work of Robert MacPherson”
When Robert MacPherson AM died, on 12 November 2021, aged 84, Australia lost one of the most important artists of his generation. What made his contribution so remarkable was the way in which he translated the arcane languages and modes of contemporary art, particularly those of conceptualism and minimalism, into images and objects that formed…
From the factory to the office, and from the studio to the streets, ‘Work, Work, Work’ brings together artworks from across the globe that respond to the ideas of labour. The concept of ‘work’ expands beyond the eight-hour working day as artists explore how we invest time and effort in education, the creation of artworks…
The reductive logic that Robert MacPherson applied to his painting practice in the 1970s is applied here to his tool, the standard house painter’s brush. Examining it closely and considering its history, MacPherson traces a backwards path from use, to purchase, to manufacture and sees that the paintbrush is already a painted object. He relinquishes…
Robert MacPherson’s work is often positioned against the historically pervasive national traditions in Australian art of landscape painting and heroic narrative. His works evoking landscape and important figures are tinged with irony, and attempt to look beyond stereotype and jingoism. Yet still they suggest something specifically Australian – whether it is language, food or cultural…
Continue reading » “Robert MacPherson: A simplistic view of a national art”
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